Monitoring food and health news -- with particular attention to fads, fallacies and the "obesity" war

Summary of findings to date: Everything you can possibly eat or drink is both bad and good for you

"Let me have men about me that are fat... Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look ... such men are dangerous." -- Shakespeare

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Play golf, live longer?

I hope the Karolinska report was more nuanced than what appears below. Cause and effect seem badly entangled. Maybe fit and healthy people are more likely to play golf

GOLFERS are never short of an excuse to take a few swings but a new study has given them a legitimate reason - golf prolongs your life. According to research from Europe's leading medical research institute, playing golf can add five years to a person's life. A study of 300,000 golfers revealed that they were 40 per cent less likely to die at any given age than those who did not play.

The study, by the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, revealed the best players, as measured by handicaps, were the healthiest of all. Despite the lack of physical activity involved in golf, golfers who play a single round of 18 holes usually walk more than 6km. Golfers have a lower death rate regardless of sex, age and social group, the study found.

The effect is greater for blue-collar workers than for those from white-collar backgrounds. Professor Anders Ahlbom, who led the study, said while not all golfers had a healthy lifestyle, it is believed playing the game has a significant impact on health. "Maintaining a low handicap involves playing a lot, so it supports the idea that it is largely the game that is good for the health," he said.

A drug to prevent bone loss during breast cancer treatment also substantially cut the risk that the cancer would return, results that left doctors excited about a possible new way to fight the disease. It is the first large study to affirm wider anti-cancer hopes for Zometa and other bone-building drugs called bisphosphonates. Zometa, made by Novartis AG, is used now for cancers that have already spread to the bone.

The new study involved 1,800 premenopausal women taking hormone treatments for early-stage breast cancer. Zometa cut by one-third the chances that cancer would recur - in their bones or anywhere else. "This is an important finding. It may well change practice," said Dr. Claudine Isaacs, director of the clinical breast cancer program at Georgetown University's Lombardi Cancer Center. About three-fourths of breast cancers occur in women after menopause. Zometa may help them, too, but it hasn't been tested yet in that age group. The study was led by Dr. Michael Gnant of the Medical University of Vienna and reported Saturday at an American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago.

If a second, ongoing study also finds a benefit, doctors predict that Zometa will quickly be tested against other cancers that tend to spread, or metastasize, to bones, such as prostate and kidney cancer. "Hugely important is whether this has to do with the fact that it just makes the bone hostile, somehow, to metastasis or if there is a more global anti-metastasis effect," said the oncology group's president, Dr. Nancy Davidson of Johns Hopkins University. "Either of those would be good and would teach us a lot about what to do next."

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. About 184,450 cases and 40,930 deaths from the disease are expected in the United States this year. Standard treatments are surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and hormone-blocking drugs if the tumors are like those in the study - helped to grow by estrogen or progesterone. The hormone-blockers often weaken bones, so bisphosphonates like the osteoporosis pill Fosamax have become increasingly popular to treat this side effect. However, using them to treat the cancer itself is a very different approach. Lab studies hinted it would work, and Gnant's is the first to test it in a large group of breast cancer patients.

All had surgery to remove their tumors and were taking hormone-blocking drugs - goserelin plus either tamoxifen or anastrozole - treatments that made them menopausal. Half also were given infusions of Zometa once every six months. The women were treated for three years and studied for two more. By then, only 6 percent of those given Zometa had suffered a relapse or died, compared to 9 percent of the others. That translated to a 36 percent decline in risk. Sixteen women given Zometa died versus 26 of the others - a difference that could have occurred by chance alone but an encouraging trend that doctors hope will mean better survival as the groups are followed for a longer time.

There were no big differences in serious side effects, though minor ones like fever and bone and joint pain were more common among women given Zometa. Two percent of all study participants developed a rapid heartbeat, but only three were hospitalized - two on Zometa and one of the others.

The study was sponsored by Zometa's maker, Swiss-based Novartis, and British-based AstraZeneca PLC, which makes Arimidex, the brand name of anastrozole. Gnant consults for the companies and several other breast cancer drugmakers. With doctor fees for the infusion, a Zometa treatment can run more than $1,200. The other large study is testing it in 3,360 pre- and postmenopausal women with cancer that has spread but not extensively.

Experts stressed that the results so far are only in women who were made menopausal by hormone-blocking treatments - not women who develop breast cancer after natural menopause. For now, using Zometa to prevent breast cancer recurrence should be confined to those who develop breast cancer before menopause, said Dr. Eric Winer of Dana-Farber Cancer Center in Boston. "This is a treatment that doctors should talk to a patient about" because of these encouraging new results, Winer said.

In other news at the conference, women with advanced breast cancers who were given Avastin plus Taxotere were a little less likely to have their cancers progress than women given Taxotere alone. However, side effects including high blood pressure were more common for those taking both drugs. Taxotere treatment is more common in Europe and Asia; in the United States, doctors are more likely to use Taxol.

In the study of 736 women, 44 percent of those given just Taxotere had their tumors shrink versus 55 percent of those also given a lower dose of Avastin and 63 percent of those given a higher dose.

Avastin, marketed by California-based Genentech and Swiss-based Roche Holding AG, recently won federal approval for breast cancer - against the recommendations of outside advisers. The approval was based on measurements like those in this study - cancer progression, rather than overall survival. The new study was too short to show any differences in survival.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

On golfing on John Ray's death-blog (adult-onset schizophrenia alert):

"The effect is greater for blue-collar workers than for those from white-collar backgrounds."

Stress hormones are very unhealthy for mammals, especially in Man, the ultimate social animal, where it is often the case that stress is due to RELATIVE SOCIAL STATUS deficiency. Suffering a hit in social status (the imagined amount of envy and attention you receive for how you live your life) causes stress hormones to skyrocket, which causes the immune and digestive system to shut down. Chronic stress is very bad. Cyclic stress can be good.

Golf is relatively lame for corporate workers since *anybody* in their social class has the time and money (and in some private clubs...invitations). But for a manual labor type of job, which is what I understand "blue collar" means in a near literal sense of wearing a janitorial or physical repair shop or assembly line job type of button-up shirt, golf is indeed a high status luxury.

A single high tech golf club can cost over a thousand US dollars and was likely designed via supercomputer. Unlike team sports, which, for our subconscious emulates a killing field of bayonets, golf subconsciously emulates aristocratic sports such as fox hunting or sport dueling in which only one or two people at a time are witnessed by many others, showing INDIVIDUAL instead of team skill. Martial arts matches serve the same function in the East (bones are not broken despite the skill to do so). Bullfighting comes to mind.

Western boxing also comes to mind as an exception that proves the rule, in that it really does cause physical trauma to the brain and requires very little white collar type of finely oiled guns or cold steely nerves.

It's funny how the article says they controlled for the undefined term "social group" but then in the next sentence mentions social group as a major effect.

Finally, golf feeds our subconscious the message that we are land owners in the extreme, so at night we dream that the golf course is part of our aristocratic estate.

The other fact is that 90%+ of golfers are men, and that their lovers usually spend "golf day" at luxury spas, literally treated like queens with the same age old "ground pearls mixed in lotion" body treatments.

Times change, but people don't. Golf and skin grooming salons (for the ladies) are just the latest incarnations of the age old fact that WASTING TIME is a high status pursuit. Besides status stories on your tongue, why would you want a dead fox inoculated with ass-licking dog spit?

John, you oft mention social class or socioeconomic factors and such things as being ignored, but just as often fail to make to link to your own field of conscious psychology to that of physiology, via the hormonal system. You also do not mention the very well-known (popular psychological cocktail party knowledge-base) of the upward vs. downward spiral effect, in this case, of golf, cause and effect are not static, but are more like a butterfly's effect on chaotic weather systems.

For that matter, you ignore to either confront (nor debunk as important) the simple idea of Free Will. I know that's asking a lot, for you are not a Jesus, Aristotle, or Nietzsche. But as a mature financially independent psychologist, YES YOU ARE, and a populist too. Snickering at idiot scientists who suffer from constipation and funding starvation if they fail to publish headline grabbing crap is and easy crap shoot.

Alas, status (and thus stress) is relative to OTHERS, not absolute, so, since we have little time to evolve beyond the instincts of our ice age ancestors, as overall wealth or IQ increase, perversions of our formerly healthy instincts continue: punitive taxes, mass rallies, obsession with manufactured novelty, junk science, bad art, psychotic religion, great men dying in poverty, as tears upon tears fill oceans. Purple, green, ultraviolet oceans, which boil and freeze at the same time, as Man creates not God in his own image, but the Devil.

Some *very* bad things are going to happen. No century has ever escaped fate.

Back to golf. What if we suddenly *could* control the weather and engineers put that thermostat knob on the wall. The wars waged to own that wall would go on forever, for money (status) would be involved, and thus access to fun sexy women (odd that nobody ever questions this oddity in women to feel sexual revulsion towards average men). In a world gone to hell, what do you do? Philosophy being the theory of right living, what might it offer? A golf course.

Don't you see? They already came for our SUVs, cooked food, and pesticides. But when they try to outlaw pesticides for golf courses, two-cycle engine (cheap) lawn mowers, land-ownership of treeless, swampless acres, then "they" will be killed, not at first with outlawed guns in police state centers, but titanium surfaced, depleted uranium cored golf clubs that shoot projectile balls as far as a crossbow.

They ended fox hunting, by letter of law.

* * *

But when they come for golf, skulls will be smashed. The blue collar golfers who also happen to own millions of guns, who, unlike the white collar noosed ones, who will cause the revolution. This will coincide with robotic advances that start to threaten blue collars in favor of silver ones. Future History only comes to me in flashes, but somehow the Chinese/Islamic war comes out greatly in favor of the ones with almost twice the IQ of the other and has a tradition of ... I lost it ... the vision is gone. Damn. It was *so* clear, but so many things I saw did not register. A mind/body/computer thing. Nothing like neural implants, but something like a new type of computer which somehow relates to free will, or finally gives it to us, or takes it away at the same time. We do not design it. It evolves, then we with it, but then we are not we any more. For the first time ever, things *do* change, deep in the brain instead of just in society.

I remember now. Engineering overtakes science, exponentially. Things happen and objects are designed that are no longer, BY DEFINITION, understandable, because some infinities are bigger than others. Gödel and Darwin trump Einstein. Fifty fifty one twenty five. Five and dime and numbers speak, but they are shapes in dimensions known not, alive but not living (only seeds), but are eternal except that they have used *us* to somehow change our mutual experience of time. I know one thing. No religion or philosophy ever expected the way in which time changed. It was numbers all along. Entropy measurement (how many ways to achieve a macroscopic state) is dead wrong. Statistics was replaced by deterministic infinities.

Indeterminate theory was found when numbers blew up in settled equations. That which is engineerable (such as the human brain via natural selection) is BY DEFINITION not functionally understandable, for if it was, it would not function, in time, would not be what we currently call "alive" or even exist at all. If it was UNDERSTANDABLE it would lack Free Will. That the universe is made of numbers is no metaphor, but numbers must be at war with each other, each infinity growing bigger than the other, each moment, by one number, each, or several, and THAT creates time (!).

It takes three points to define space on a plane. But there is no such THING as a circle which never STOP (in time) settling down, only a few seconds until they are beyond the tiny size of atoms, mice and men, as the triangle sits and waits, forever, for the digits of "pi" to stop plucking and eating chickens, or playing golf.

Where it is not bunk is when it shows that some treatment or influence has no effect on lifespan or disease incidence. It is as convincing as disproof as it is unconvincing as proof. Think about it. As Einstein said: No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

Epidemiological studies are useful for hypothesis-generating or for hypothesis-testing of theories already examined in experimental work but they do not enable causative inferences by themselves

The standard of reasoning that one commonly finds in epidemiological journal articles is akin to the following false syllogism:
Chairs have legs
You have legs
So therefore you are a chair

I am rather in despair that important medical research is plagued by arrant nonsense. The simple truth that correlation is not causation seems unknown to most medical writers. As a last ditch attempt to get that truth into a few more skulls let me be "offensive". Offensiveness may serve to get the matter noticed. So here is the story: There is about a -.5 correlation between lip size and IQ. Big lips predict low IQ. Your run-of-the mill medical researcher will pounce on that as a huge breakthrough in finding the causes of IQ -- and propound new theories about things such as blood circulation to explain how lips affect IQ. But that is nonsense. Big lips are mostly found on people of African ancestry and, as all the studies attest, Africans are a very low IQ group. The correlation arises because of heredity, not lip size. There is a third factor behind the correlation -- and the possibility of such third factors seems to be a jaw-dropping surprise to most medical researchers

SALT -- SALT -- SALT

1). A good example of an epidemiological disproof concerns the dreaded salt (NaCl). We are constantly told that we eat too much salt for good health and must cut back our consumption of it. Yet there is one nation that consumes huge amounts of salt. So do they all die young there? Quite the reverse: Japan has the world's highest concentration of centenarians. Taste Japan's favourite sauce -- soy sauce -- if you want to understand Japanese salt consumption. It's almost solid salt.

2). We need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. So the conventional wisdom is not only wrong. It is positively harmful

3). Table salt is a major source of iodine, which is why salt is normally "iodized" by official decree. Cutting back salt consumption runs the risk of iodine deficiency, with its huge adverse health impacts -- goiter, mental retardation etc. GIVE YOUR BABY PLENTY OF SALTY FOODS -- unless you want to turn it into a cretin

4). Our blood has roughly the same concentration of salt as sea-water so claims that the body cannot handle high levels of salt were always absurd

5). The latest academic study shows that LOW salt in your blood is most likely to lead to heart attacks. See JAMA. 2011;305(17):1777-1785. More here and here and here for similar findings. Salt is harmless but a deficiency of it is not. We need it. See also here

PEANUTS: There is a vaccination against peanut allergy -- peanuts themselves. Give peanut products (e.g. peanut butter -- or the original "Bamba" if you have Israeli contacts) to your baby as soon as it begins to take solid foods and that should immunize it for life. See here and here (scroll down). It's also likely that a mother who eats peanuts while she is lactating may confer some protection on her baby. See here

THE SIDE-EFFECT MANIA. If a drug is shown to have troublesome side-effects, there are always calls for it to be banned or not authorized for use in the first place. But that is insane. ALL drugs have side effects. Even aspirin causes stomach bleeding, for instance -- and paracetamol (acetaminophen) can wreck your liver. If a drug has no side effects, it will have no main effects either. If you want a side-effect-free drug, take a homeopathic remedy. They're just water.

Although I am an atheist, I have never wavered from my view that the New Testament is the best guide to living and I still enjoy reading it. Here is what the apostle Paul says about vegetarians: "For one believeth that he may eat all things: another, who is weak, eateth herbs. Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth." (Romans 14: 2.3). What perfect advice! That is real tolerance: Very different from the dogmatism of the food freaks. Interesting that vegetarianism is such an old compulsion, though.

Even if we concede that getting fat shortens your life, what right has anybody got to question someone's decision to accept that tradeoff for themselves? Such a decision could be just one version of the old idea that it is best to have a short life but a merry one. Even the Bible is supportive of that thinking. See Ecclesiastes 8:15 and Isaiah 22: 13. To deny the right to make such a personal decision is plainly Fascistic.

Obesity does NOT causes diabetes. But insatiable eating is a prominent symptom of diabetes. So diabetes DOES cause obesity, which accounts for the correlation between the two things. The streets are full of fatties who don't have diabetes. How come? If conventional medical theory were correct we should be in the midst of an epidemic of diabetes. A recent high quality study has also found that fatties are LESS likely to die of diabetes

Elite people frequently express disapproval of red meat eating as a way of expressing their felt superiority to the ordinary people who eat it

IQ: Political correctness makes IQ generally unmentionable so it is rarely controlled for in epidemiological studies. This is extremely regrettable as it tends to vitiate findings that do not control for it. When it is examined, it is routinely found to have pervasive effects. We read, for instance, that "The mother's IQ was more highly predictive of breastfeeding status than were her race, education, age, poverty status, smoking, the home environment, or the child's birth weight or birth order". So political correctness can render otherwise interesting findings moot

"To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact" -- Charles Darwin

"Most men die of their remedies, not of their diseases", said Moliere. That may no longer be true in general but there is still a lot of false medical "wisdom" around that does harm to various degrees -- the statin and antioxidant fads, for instance. And showing its falsity is rarely the problem. The problem is getting people -- medical researchers in particular -- to abandon their preconceptions

Bertrand Russell could have been talking about today's conventional dietary "wisdom" when he said: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

The challenge, as John Maynard Keynes knew, "lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones".

"Obesity" is 77% genetic. So trying to make fatties slim is punishing them for the way they were born. That sort of thing is furiously condemned in relation to homosexuals so why is it OK for fatties?

****************

Some more problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize dietary fat. But Eskimos living on their traditional diet eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. At any given age they in fact have an exceptionally LOW incidence of cardiovascular disease. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

11). A major cause of increasing obesity is certainly the campaign against it -- as dieting usually makes people FATTER. If there were any sincerity to the obesity warriors, they would ban all diet advertising and otherwise shut up about it. Re-authorizing now-banned school playground activities and school outings would help too. But it is so much easier to blame obesity on the evil "multinationals" than it is to blame it on your own restrictions on the natural activities of kids

12. Fascism: "What we should be doing is monitoring children from birth so we can detect any deviations from the norm at an early stage and action can be taken". Who said that? Joe Stalin? Adolf Hitler? Orwell's "Big Brother"? The Spanish Inquisition? Generalissimo Francisco Franco Bahamonde? None of those. It was Dr Colin Waine, chairman of Britain's National Obesity Forum. What a fine fellow!

*********************

Trans fats: For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The "antioxidant" religion: The experimental evidence is that antioxidants SHORTEN your life, if anything. Studies here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here, for instance. That they are of benefit is a great theory but it is one that has been coshed by reality plenty of times.

The medical consensus is often wrong. The best known wrongheaded medical orthodoxy is that stomach ulcers could not be caused by bacteria because the stomach is so acidic. Disproof of that view first appeared in 1875 (Yes. 1875) but the falsity of the view was not widely recognized until 1990. Only heroic efforts finally overturned the consensus and led to a cure for stomach ulcers. See
here and here and here.

Dieticians are just modern-day witch-doctors. There is no undergirding in double-blind studies for their usual recommendations

The fragility of current medical wisdom: Would you believe that even Old Testament wisdom can sometimes trump medical wisdom? Note this quote: "Spiess discussed Swedish research on cardiac patients that compared Jehovah's Witnesses who refused blood transfusions to patients with similar disease progression during open-heart surgery. The research found those who refused transfusions had noticeably better survival rates.

Medical wisdom can in fact fly in the face of the known facts. How often do we hear reverent praise for the Mediterranean diet? Yet both Australians and Japanese live longer than Greeks and Italians, despite having very different diets. The traditional Australian diet is in fact about as opposite to the Mediterranean diet as you can get. The reverence for the Mediterranean diet can only be understood therefore as some sort of Anglo-Saxon cultural cringe. It is quite brainless. Why are not the Australian and Japanese diets extolled if health is the matter at issue?

Since many of my posts here make severe criticisms of medical research, I should perhaps point out that I am also a severe critic of much research in my own field of psychology. See here and here

This is NOT an "alternative medicine" site. Perhaps the only (weak) excuse for the poorly substantiated claims that often appear in the medical literature is the even poorer level of substantiation offered in the "alternative" literature.

I used to teach social statistics in a major Australian university and I find medical statistics pretty obfuscatory. They seem uniformly designed to make mountains out of molehills. Many times in the academic literature I have excoriated my colleagues in psychology and sociology for going ga-ga over very weak correlations but what I find in the medical literature makes the findings in the social sciences look positively muscular. In fact, medical findings are almost never reported as correlations -- because to do so would exhibit how laughably trivial they generally are. If (say) 3 individuals in a thousand in a control group had some sort of an adverse outcome versus 4 out of a thousand in a group undergoing some treatment, the difference will be published in the medical literature with great excitement and intimations of its importance. In fact, of course, such small differences are almost certainly random noise and are in any rational calculus unimportant. And statistical significance is little help in determining the importance of a finding. Statistical significance simply tells you that the result was unlikely to be an effect of small sample size. But a statistically significant difference could have been due to any number of other randomly-present factors.

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

The Truth About Ancel Keys. Keys was a brilliant man but his concentration on heart disease misled him. He was right that high fat intake predicted high rates of heart disease (though it was ANIMAL fat in particular that was the "culprit") but he overlooked that the same intake predicted LESS mortality from other causes. The same narrow vision led him to be the earliest prominent advocate of the "Mediterranean diet" hypothesis. It's true that Mediterraneans have less heart disease but they have more of other causes of death, so that Mediterranean countries do not have particularly long lifespans when compared with other developed countries. If there are any lessons about diet to be learned from lifespans, it is un-Mediterranean countries like Australia and the Nordic countries that one should look to.

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) could have been speaking of the prevailing health "wisdom" of today when he said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

Improbable events do happen at random -- as mathematician John Brignell notes rather tartly: "Consider, instead, my experiences in the village pub swindle. It is based on the weekly bonus ball in the National Lottery. It so happens that my birth date is 13, so that is the number I always choose. With a few occasional absences abroad I have paid my pound every week for a year and a half, but have never won. Some of my neighbours win frequently; one in three consecutive weeks. Furthermore, I always put in a pound for my wife for her birth date, which is 11. She has never won either. The probability of neither of these numbers coming up in that period is less than 5%, which for an epidemiologist is significant enough to publish a paper.

Kids are not shy anymore. They are "autistic". Autism is a real problem but the rise in its incidence seems likely to be the product of overdiagnosis -- the now common tendency to medicalize almost all problems.

One of the great pleasures in life is the first mouthful of cold beer on a hot day -- and the food Puritans can stick that wherever they like

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here